Abstract
Five- and six-year-old children (n = 160) participated in three studies designed to explore language discrimination. After an initial exposure period (during which children heard either an unfamiliar language, a familiar language, or music), children performed an ABX discrimination task involving two unfamiliar languages that were either similar (Spanish vs. Italian) or different (Spanish vs. Mandarin). On each trial, participants heard two sentences spoken by two individuals, each spoken in an unfamiliar language. The pair was followed by a third sentence spoken in one of the two languages. Participants were asked to judge whether the third sentence was spoken by the first speaker or the second speaker. Across studies, both the difficulty of the discrimination contrast and the relation between exposure and test materials affected children’s performance. In particular, language discrimination performance was facilitated by an initial exposure to a different unfamiliar language, suggesting that experience can help tune children’s attention to the relevant features of novel languages.
Highlights
In multilingual environments, children must determine which individuals speak the same language, and which individuals speak different languages
In the absence of exposure to an unfamiliar language, children found it easier to discriminate between typologically distinct languages (Spanish and Mandarin; Easy contrast) than typologically similar languages (Spanish and Italian; Difficult contrast), partially supporting our initial prediction
Unlike children in the Control condition, children who were exposed to Mandarin no longer performed better on the Easy contrast than on the Difficult contrast, suggesting that exposure to Mandarin may have a different effect on the two types of Test contrasts
Summary
Children must determine which individuals speak the same language, and which individuals speak different languages. Syllable duration is less variable in syllable-timed languages such as French and Italian, and in Japanese, the rhythmic unit is the mora (Otake et al, 1993). Using these cues, newborn French infants can discriminate between English and Japanese, which have distinctive rhythmic properties, but do not distinguish between English and Dutch, which belong to the same non-native rhythmic class (Nazzi et al, 1998)
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